Shays's Rebellion (follow-up)

[Joel S. Berson]

I was appalled at the lack of interest in the early history of the
United States (only 3 hits?), until I googled (*not* Google News-ed) and found:

Shays'   Rebellion - 48,700
Shays's Rebellion - 12, 600

and Google even has an opinion on the latter spelling:  it asks me
      Did you mean: "shay's rebellion"

I observe that Google News seems to strip the apostrophe:
      Results 1 - 3 of 3 for shays-rebellion  [droppping the
quotation marks here]
but Google does not:
      Results 1 - 10 of about 48,700 for "shays' rebellion"

But what does the following say to us about pronunciation?!

Jesus' -- about 70,300,000
Jesus's -- about    570,000

Joel

At 12/1/2005 02:01 PM, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Mullins, Bill" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
>Subject:      Re: Shays's Rebellion (follow-up)
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >I just googled Shays' Rebellion and Shays's Rebellion.
> >
> >Google News
> >
> >Shays' .... 3
> >Shays's...  0
>
>One almost wants to repeat this search, just to find out why Shays' =
>Rebellion was in the news.